Tommy Smith - Bringing It All Back Home

His latest initiative is to form a new group called Karma which mines new fertile jazz-rock and folk territory for the enterprising saxophonist. Stuart Nicholson talks to Smith about his thinking behind the new band and how he sees the way ahead for jazz in his homeland.

It’s hard to say whether saxophonist, composer and arranger Tommy Smith is on a spiritual journey. If he is he’s not prepared to talk about it, but his thirst for knowledge has led him to confronting what he calls “the big ideas.” What he means is his curiosity about the religions of the world and man’s attempts to rationalise his destiny through religious enquiry. While he says he does not believe in God, he also adds that he does not entirely rule him out either, telling The Scottish Herald, “I have a spiritual curiosity about everything. People need faith and society needs faith.” It was this curiosity that provided the inspiration behind some of his most powerful music in recent years. His World of the Gods, written for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and the Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers, is a ten piece suite inspired by the Shinto gods while Torah, released on his own Spartacus label in 2010 and also written for the SNJO, is inspired by the five books of the “Jewish Bible.” So it is perhaps unsurprising that his latest album – his first in seven years with his own small group – is called Karma because another “big idea” underpins its inspiration. Karma, according to the dictionary definition, is the Buddhist belief that future existence is determined by the cumulative consequence of a person’s acts in one stage of his or her existence as controlling his or her destiny in the next.

Recorded in August last year and mixed by the legendary sound engineer Jan Erik Konshaug in the Rainbow Studios in Oslo, Smith is joined by an all-Scots line-up of Steve Hamilton on piano and synthesisers and Alyn Cosker drums plus newcomer Kevin Glasgow on electric bass on what is his most exciting album to date. “I was offered an opportunity to play a festival with my own group,” explains Smith, relaxing in the comfortable surroundings of a Heathrow hotel lounge. “But I didn’t have a group because I never play in the festivals in Scotland with my own bands, never have done for years and years, because I always give it to the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and if I play with them I couldn’t do my own thing, so I ended up giving the gigs away. So when I got the opportunity to do it, I thought this is a good opportunity to write some music, play with some people I admire and take some of experiences I had touring plus some of the things which I actually like such as heavy metal and Garbarek and all these things, and just make some music with four people who are virtuosos and could play it without too much hardship. And it ended up being a very fulfilling project, it was difficult making, sure, but fulfilling.”

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